Photographer/artist Mari Hernandez talks to her subject after she makes photographs at the Guadalupe Gallery for an outdoor installation about motherhood on Friday, Jan. 20, 2012.

Photographer/artist Mari Hernandez talks to her subject after she makes photographs at the Guadalupe Gallery for an outdoor installation about motherhood on Friday, Jan. 20, 2012.

Photo: Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News

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Photographer/artist Mari Hernandez takes pictures at the Guadalupe Gallery for an outdoor installation about motherhood.

Photographer/artist Mari Hernandez takes pictures at the Guadalupe Gallery for an outdoor installation about motherhood.

Photo: Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News

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Photographer/artist Mari Hernandez (left) chats with Monica Pedroza before a portrait session at the Guadalupe Gallery for an outdoor installation about motherhood.

Photographer/artist Mari Hernandez (left) chats with Monica Pedroza before a portrait session at the Guadalupe Gallery for an outdoor installation about motherhood.

Photo: Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News

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Photographer/artist Mari Hernandez (right) makes photographs of Christina Gonzales who was carrying her daughter Eydie at the Guadalupe Gallery for an outdoor installation about motherhood.

Photographer/artist Mari Hernandez (right) makes photographs of Christina Gonzales who was carrying her daughter Eydie at the Guadalupe Gallery for an outdoor installation about motherhood.

Photo: Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News

Photographer seeks to capture nature of mother-child bond

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While driving on a West Side street, photographer Mari Hernandez caught a glimpse of a woman waiting at a bus stop with her children.

One was at her shoulder and another at her knees. Clustered together, for a moment the group looked like a single entity to Hernandez.

"It was an interesting thing to see because it looked like this big form," she says.

The image stayed with her and inspired her latest project. Hernandez explores motherhood and the mother-child bond in Spotlight: HER Face, an outdoor photography installation on the outer wall of the Guadalupe Gallery that faces Brazos Street.

The project is part of the Guadalupe Cultural Art Center's Spotlight: Mujer series of installations continuing through March 31. Over the three-month run, Hernandez will continue taking photographs and posting them on the wall, creating, in effect, an evolving mural. In addition, images will be posted on the Guadalupe's website.

Initially, Hernandez, a member of the Chicana arts collective Mas Rudas, was invited to create a series of portraits of women, but the memory of the woman waiting at the bus stop led her in a different direction.

"I started thinking about it, and it sort of evolved from that to trying to create images of women with their children to where the children look like a part of them - which they are," she says. "(I'm) trying to come up with these very organic shapes because I'm interested in shapes."

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The idea, Hernandez says, is to fit the black-and-white images together like puzzle pieces, incorporating colors and organic shapes to create a tableau. The Guadalupe put out a call for women with children and mothers-to-be interested in being photographed by Hernandez, and the photographer did the same on her Facebook page.

Hernandez began the piece with a single image of an elderly woman, known to residents of the near West Side for keeping the exterior of her home and backyard decorated with strings of objects and all manner of knickknacks.

Along with the visual aspect, Hernandez is interested in capturing some of the emotional complexity of the mother-child relationship, with the push-and-pull that is part and parcel of children growing up and asserting their independence, and the ambivalence that is sometimes part of motherhood or impending motherhood.

"When I started looking at images online, for women and pregnancy and moms and their children, it's always something very happy and very positive, and yes, a part of it is that, but there's also a huge side that doesn't get portrayed," she says. "So I'm hoping the images explore more of that - explore the intense relationships. A lot of portraits that I've already taken are very intense and very personal."

On a recent Friday evening, Hernandez was at the Guadalupe Gallery doing her third shoot for the project, using a blank wall as a backdrop.

Monica Gutierrez Pedroza, 41, a former member of the Guadalupe Dance Company, was among the women there. Pregnant after multiple miscarriages, she wore a black T-shirt with white script that read: "For this child, I prayed" from the Old Testament.

Pedroza says she decided to participate in the project "just to celebrate the fact that my pregnancy finally took after so many struggles."

While Hernandez photographed Pedraza, Angelica Olivares, 46, and her daughter Judy, 6, still in her school uniform, prepared themselves for their moment in front of the camera. Olivares brushed her daughter's long, sandy-brown hair, and Judy smoothed on lip balm.

"When I take your picture, all you've got to think about is everything she does for you, all the happy times you have together and all of that love inside of you," Hernandez instructed Judy before she began the session.

As Hernandez snapped, the smiling mother and daughter held hands and touched foreheads together, creating Hernandez's favorite image of the evening.

"(Hernandez) said, 'Be very affectionate and do what you do at home,' " Olivares says. "I said, 'That should be real simple' because I'm always taking her and hugging her and kissing her, and she's like, 'Mom, OK, that's enough!' "

Along with the images, the stories Hernandez's subjects tell her about the joys and trials of motherhood are helping shape the project.

"The power of the piece is really going to lie in their stories also, so I want to try and remember these things … (The project) is still sort of unfolding at this point," she says. "They asked me to do it, and then a week later, I started, so it's still a concept, and it's shifting as I do this or I meet somebody else or I hear another story, so I think I'm just going with it. It's going to be a little spontaneous."